Objective: We compared agreement between child and parent responses to questions assessing prevalence of asthma and other severe respiratory symptoms.
Study design and setting: Fifth-grade children enrolled in public schools and their parents separately completed a health survey, which included respiratory symptom questions from the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC). Agreement on respiratory symptom questions was assessed with Cohen's Kappa coefficient. Asthma prevalence estimates based on responses to several questions were also compared using child and parent data. The analysis was based on a study sample size of 230 matched parent and child questionnaires.
Results: High levels of agreement (Kappa: 0.76 and 0.79) between child and parent responses were observed for current and lifetime asthma, and similar asthma prevalence estimates were obtained from child and parent response data. Five of the questions on potentially severe respiratory symptoms had low to fair levels of agreement (Kappa: -0.01 to 0.38), resulting in statistically significantly different prevalence estimates in three of the five symptoms.
Conclusions: Separate parent and child responses to a series of respiratory symptom and asthma questions yielded similar estimates for asthma prevalence but different estimates for the prevalence of several severe respiratory symptoms.